Excess of everything is bad. This phrase is the matrix for today’s discussion. Twitter’s been there for some time now, people quite enjoy it. Some people use it occasionally whilst some stick to it whole day long like glue sticks to wood. Nevertheless, both the power user and the occasional user enjoys it. They use it the way they want, the way they wish. All it matters is how you use the platform. Some use it for fun, some for networking and some for socializing. But there are some people, who’ll exploit the platform. I don’t blame them. That’s human nature. We’ll exploit anything beyond repair that’s made for our benefit. So is the case with our environment, customs, religions and science.

Coming to a shorter scale, Twitter’s still growing, people are still getting used to it. We still have time when we can keep our actions in line so that the system is not exploited. This article is not as serious as it sounds, I am talking about a single website, not the environment or global warming though. Expect some sarcasm and pun is intended - everywhere. Thanks.

You’re a Hashtag Freak

The number of tweets that flow into your timeline is usually so much that keeping a track of them becomes a hassle. People usually create groups using Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or DestroyTwitter. But the old school way of managing tweets is by using hashtags.

Any word, with a # appended to it becomes a hashtag. These tags are tracked by the hashtags.org site which displays the stats for each tag and shows how frequently it is being used. Take a look at the example below:

Sachin  just got stumped :( #IPL

This is a fair use of hashtags. The hashtag #IPL makes it clear that the tweet is about IPL. Now check this out.

#Sucks! #Sachin caught by #Warne. #IPL is getting #terrible.

Too many hashtags. The tweet is categorized under 5 categories. But what is their use? No use basically. When one searches for related tweets on Twitter Search, the chances of getting results related to IPL is the same when searched for ‘#IPL’ or ‘IPL’. This is best explained by Preshit in a post of his.The user simply clutters his timeline, annoys his followers and comes to be known has a hashtag freak.

You Live By RTs

These people, you know, don’t have thoughts of their own. The most typed words on their keyboard are R & T. The love other people so much that they’ll retweet everything they post. Plagiarism is the best form of flattery — applies best here. Most of their timeline is filled with links and witnessing an actual “What are you doing” classic tweet from them is a no easy task.

Even if they publish with credit, as they might say, what additional value do they add to it? At least a thought or a view on that particular tweet? Or let people know what you think of that cool link? That’d be better.

You Love Links. And Tim Berners Lee is your Idol.

Mostly like our RT loving friends, these people love no other thing except links. They are illusioned and think that Twitter is not about conversations, rather about the love of tinyurls and how they should be brought into use frequently or they may die.

These people don’t really need a twitter client. Because twitter clients are for two-way conversations, and they don’t need two-way conversations. Friendfeed is thier best friend, which cross posts all their activity to their timeline and they really don’t like telling people what they are actually doing, rather they’ll happily tell everyone what they are reading, or LOLing on or what’s the most awesome post of the day. They’ll present you with a continuous stream of links without their thought on any of them. Great, isn’t it?

FollowFriday is a Great Concept. You Tap the Hell Out of It.

A cool dude named Micah Baldwin started the concept of Follow Friday. His ideology was, that on every Friday, people will recommend enjoyable tweeps to other people who are new to twitter. This was kinda cool. It worked very well for the initial days but as days passed, some of our fellow twitterers, ahem, expert twitterers and social media experts thought that it will be very cool to flood your gratitude on Fridays and recommend everyone on their list. And thus, this →

changed to this →

You Like Playing Silly Games

Instead of doing something productive, some people are interested in liesgirlstell or thingsmummysaid and words that people say after doing something that is beyond the scope of this blog and my interest. Providing no value in terms of knowledge or entertainment, even kindergarten games are more interesting than these ones. So rather than playing some airheaded game, it’s better if we go out and have some fresh air. Fresh air and coffee? yeah!

It’s What You Make of It

Finally, Twitter is what YOU make of it. In the end, nobody cares if you tweet quotes all day long (like a grandmother) or provide something of quality to your followers. All it matters is how you care for twitter. And take care for people who use it, like you and me.

On an ending note, everyone should know that twitter is neither email and nor a competition.

Thanks to ijafri for the Bingo Cartoon

Post from: Fabworker

How People Go Wrong With Twitter: It’s What You Make Of It

How People Go Wrong With Twitter: It’s What You Make Of It

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No doubt there are all those superb to-do applications out there that can take up your tasks, send you reminders wherever you want, send invites and a lot more but sometimes all you want is a simple thing called a “to-do list”, without the fuss. Early man could manage his stuff on the walls, your grandfather can use a simple notepad to make task lists so why is it that you need a full hotshot, fully blown package of to-do list reminders and apps? (Excuse the exaggeration, but you got the idea)

I have tried various feature rich to-do list applications and web apps, which instead of helping me to focus on what I should do, distract me to various other inappropriate things. Moreover, some people find it difficult to get used to services like RTM. Can your tech-illiterate grandma use RTM? No! She can use these following tools which are simple and useful at the same time.

So, without further ado, here is my list of to-do apps that I think will keep you focused and punctual without any hassles »

DeadlineApp

DeadlineApp is a dead simple online to-do app. You can set reminders with dates and time in simple english and it will pass it on accordingly. The tasks which are closer to the deadline appear brightest while the ones which occur later appear are toned down. DeadlineApp keeps things simple and at the same time sports some intuitive features such as a mobile and iPhone app.

Doomi

Doomi is a small nifty adobe air based to-do list app that is simply awesome. It is one of the simplest reminder apps I have ever seen. You just pop it up, enter a task and press enter. When you are done with it, just check the task and it will vanish. You can set dates and time for a reminder but that’s not a necessity.

Since Doomi runs on Adobe Air, you can run it on any platform, not only Windows. It sits in your system tray when not in use. Got an idea? Pop it up and fill in! (Fabworker’s review for doomi)

Tadalist

Tadalist is one simple and elegant to-do app. You select a list title, add items and when they are done, check them. Simple. Now fuss, all fizz. The best part is that you can share your list with others with a public url. You can also select if the list can be edited by others when being shared.

TaskFive

This web app has been made in just 5 days. Don’t let that lure you into believing that it might not be good. TaskFive is a to-do list with a twist (that rhymes?). It works on the principle of Five things a day. So you won’t be able to make a long list for a day, though that will keep you stress free! =P It has a calendar like interface so you probably won’t get a problem getting used to it.

Printable Checklist

If you type faster than you write, this might come in as a useful thing. Printable checklist lets us make a simple checklist with tickable boxes. You can then print that checklist easily and put it on a notice board or something. As tasks are finished, you can keep ticking them with a pen. This can be useful for preparing a grocery list or traveling checklists when we cannot take a computer or laptop with us everywhere.

Minitask

Minitask is quite similar to Doomi, based on Adobe Air. It brings a new feel of minimalism and is very easy to set up. You can categorize your tasks into ’separators’ and drag tasks between them easily. A great task manager, it is a little more feature rich that doomi, though not when it comes to looks. You can try them out and decide for yourself which one is better.

Todoist

Another web app on the list, todoist lets you create a project and then put tasks under it. This way, you can easily categorize your tasks in the way they are to be done and for which project. You can easily reorder tasks and edit them. When you check a task, it moves into the ‘history’ where you can see all your previously finished tasks.

NowDoThis

If you talk about simplicity, this one takes the prize. As the name says, NowDoThis will only show you your next task once the previous one is done. First you make a list as you would do in a notepad – one entry in each line. Once done and submitted, you will be given just one task on the screen. As you finish the task, you can click the ‘done’ button and the next task will be shown. You can also edit the list for adding new task.

Everyone has a different way to organize themselves and manage tasks. What’s yours?

Post from: Fabworker

8 Simple To-Do Apps That Manage To-Do And Nothing Else

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With a bunch of new features, the open source and free media player, Songbird took a plunge to version 1.1 yesterday. I have been using the previous version for the last few weeks and I have to say that I’m quite impressed. Though I won’t call it the iTunes killer, it still performs it’s intended functions very well.

With the new release, you can enjoy some very cool features, some of them being:

1. Fetch Album Art from Last.Fm: With just one click, you can bring the right album art for your entire library of songs. Or if you like, you can also get the artwork for a single or a bunch of songs specifically. Art is fetched from Last.fm, support for Amazon.com can be added with an add-on.

2. Watch Folders: Choose to watch a folder on your computer and the library keeps itself in sync. You delete a file in the folder, it’s deleted from SongBird. You add an album in the folder, it’s synced to Songbird. How neat.

3. Better Sorting: Now if you add “The Fray” to your library, it will be sorted with albums starting with ‘F’ and not ‘T’.

4. Better Gapless Playback: Songbird is now able to skip padding data that does not contain audio, leading to perfect gapless playback.

5. A Digital Music Store: Songbird has teamed up with 7Digital to bring a music digital store from where you can buy high quality MP3s. I couldn’t find many new albums there, but a listed top selling one with 31 tracks can be bought for $9.99. Still a scope for improvement here. The store is in beta.

Apart from these, the Songbird team has also fixed many bugs, released patches to fix the 10 crash causing annoyances and reduced memory consumption by 40%. Great improvement on this part though.

My Favorite Features:

1. Seamless Last.fm Integration: With Last.fm integrated, I can scrobble all my tracks to Last.fm and love or ban tracks. As Songbird also has an integrated browser, I can easily check mine and anyone’s profiles too.

2. The LyricMaster Add-on: The Lyric Master add-on creates a narrow pane on the left where the lyrics of the current playing songs are displayed. It takes the data from the track’s ID3 tags, looks up for their lyrics on the internet and gets them for you. All this is done under the hood and it is quick! (Make sure your artists’ and album tags are correct) Get it here.

3. Watch Folders: Although I have been using this feature since yesterday only, I am totally in love with it. Whenever I get a new album, I just put it in the folder designated to watch and it is “automagically” imported into my library, no fuss, all fizz.

4. Add-ons and Themes (Feathers): Songbird, just like Firefox, can be customized with addons and themes and there is a growing repository of them here.

Well of course, there are other features such as making smart playlists, podcasts support (called subscriptions) , shoutcast radio, and many more with the help of addons, but all I want it is a media player that works the right way. Seems like I have got it.

Post from: Fabworker

Songbird ( flies high and ) Keeps Me Glued   

Songbird ( flies high and ) Keeps Me Glued   

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It was only when @b50 asked me how I inserted stars (★) in one of my tweets that I considered writing a post on it, as it was the second or third time someone asked me that question.

As a matter of fact, apart from accepting normal text, Twitter can also take up special characters like these ♬ ☛ ♥ as it is UTF8 compatible.

I haven’t brought these characters from some underground mine, they are all available right in your computer. The only difference is that they don’t have a designated key on the keyboard.

To get these special characters, all you have to do is get TwitterKeys. Don’t fret, it’s not another twitter client or service, its just a javascript browser bookmarklet that you use as a bookmark, simple.

Drag this link to your browser

bookmarks toolbar: TwitterKeys

Just drag the the above link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, and when you click it, a floating window open. Just select, copy the desired symbol and paste it in your tweet.

Another way out if you are on Windows, pressing Winkey+R (brings up the run dialog) and then opening charmap brings up the character map application. You can find the special characters here too but it’s a lot more stuffed with unnecessary stuff you won’t ever need. So you are better off with TwitterKeys.

I hope you ♥ this post.

Post from: Fabworker

How To (heart) and (love) Stuff On Twitter

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Every one likes free Wifi. They always come in handy when you are not at home or office and need to get online immediately. So what? Move over to some coffee shop or fast food corner with a free wifi hostspot and hook your laptop up. But the problem arises when you have to SEARCH for places with wifi hotspots. OpenWifiSpots makes your job easy if you live in the States.

OpenWifiSpots is basically a Google Maps mashup. It shows you wifi hotspots from most of the states in the US. You can search for your place, check from their list or checkout their guides. The guides on OpenWifiSpots are the real deal maker, you get to search by Restaurants with Wifi, Hotels, motels with WiFi, Coffee houses and bookstores with Wifi and so on. On the other hand, you can also comment on the hotspots listed and review them.

In all, it saves you time (and money). Try it, and let us know if you were able to send that email or book those movie tickets.

Image: davezilla

Post from: Fabworker

Find Free WiFi HotSpots Across The US

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Quite some time back, Twitter discontinued their IM bot service with which we could send and recieve tweets. I was a real digger for that. But unfortunately, it is no more running, which urged me to look for alternatives. 

Tweet.IM

Using Tweet.im is very easy. It lets you do both the jobs, receiving and sending tweets, though the tweets are recieved in batches at short intervals, meaning recieving of tweets is not live, though it’s not even late.

You will need to enter you twitter username and password on their site and also you google talk username. It will then send a add request to your google talk which you can accept and then start sending and recieving tweets.

Excla.IM

Excla.im is another IM bot which is built on the Google App Engine and works on a python framework. It works only for sending tweets and isn’t built to recieve them. It is free, just like Tweet.im and you will need a google account to sign up with it. It will then use an OAuth connection with twitter to let it send tweets to your account.

Both of the above mentioned service work well, though nothing can be compared with the long dead original Twitter Bot. I wish Twitter brings it back to life soon.

And by the way, if you’re interested, I tweet as @keshav

If you think Twitter has not been able to scale with it’s demand and requirement, i am sure this will make you laugh.

Thanks to geekculture for the comic!

Post from: Fabworker

Post To Twitter From Google Talk

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If you have been thinking about downloading some of those high definition videos on youtube, this might be the end of your problem. KeepHD is an online tool that lets you download Youtube videos in high definition format (The ones that have been uploaded in 720p)

If you have a high speed broadband internet connection, what’s better than dowloading high definition videos off youtube. KeepHD doesn’t do what its name says, rather it does much more. In addition to downloading HighDefinition videos, you can also download video in 3GP for your mobile, FLV low quality and MP4 high quality. It serves as a one stop for all your youtube downloading needs.

To get it to work, you just enter the youtube video url, which looks something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cpd_lHjFDk and click download video. You can then choose between the download options mentioned above and proceed to the download.

To play the downloaded high def videos, VLC is quite good, with Apple’s Quick Time Player on the other hand. VLC can also play the FLV files, if you download the video on low quality format.

Post from: Fabworker

Download YouTube HD Videos

Download YouTube HD Videos

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Welcome to the new Fabworker. Last night, I pushed a new theme update up here making it a complete design overhaul. I had been thinking about a new theme since the past few months as the previous theme was a little more busy for my needs.

The new design is a very simple one, very minimalistic (and elegant too). It doesn’t have any special, fancy design bells on it, neither is it code heavy which makes it load faster than the previous one, which was a magazine theme.

I also updated the about and archives pages. Do let me know how you like the new design and consider sending in your opinion, criticism whatsoever, good or bad, Any suggestion is more than welcomed.

Post from: Fabworker

The New Fabworker

The New Fabworker

When it comes to file sharing, my first preference is always p2p, rather bittorent. And my favorite site for searching torrents is Mininova. With an index so large (billions!), searching for the right torrent can be a little tricky, unless, of course, you learn some power tricks.

I have always been a fan of Keyword Search in Firefox. Recently, i have been using Google Chrome and I was very happy to see that Google Chrome also has a similar feature simply called as ‘Search Engines’. Today I will talk about how you can set custom searches in Chrome and Firefox for searching different categories and also setting the arrangement of the results.

Implement Custom Searches

For those of you who haven’t yet explored the power of custom keyword searches, follow my article on implementing them in firefox. For Chrome users like me, this is all you have to do:

• Right click on the Chrome Addressbar and Click Edit Search Engines.
• Click Add
• Add a name. For example, ‘Latest Movies’ for searching the Movies by the date added.
• Add a keyword. Make it short, like ‘lamov’ for Latest Movies. Make sure you remember it.
• Add the URL you wish to implement the search for. For example add http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/4/added. Click Ok.

This is How it Works

• You type in your keyword , lamov in this case.
• Enter your search term. Press Enter
• Your search performed on Mininova’s Movie section with the movies sorted by their date.
• This way, you can create different searches for different sections and sorting order. Below you can see the search URLs for different sections and sorting orders available on mininova. 

Searching All Categories

Search All Categories Sorting The Torrents By Seeds

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/seeds

Search All Categories Sorting The Torrents By Size

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/size

Search All Categories Sorting the Torrents By Leechers

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/leech

Search All Categories Sorting The Torrents By Comments

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/comments

Search All Categories Sorting The Torrents By Name

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/name

Search All Categories Sorting The Torrents By Date When Added

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/added

To search for a particular category, follow the syntax below and change the (required-arrangement) with one of the options given above.

Searching Anime

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/1/(required-arrangement)

Searching Books

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/2/(required-arrangement)

Searching Games

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/3/(required-arrangement)

Searching Movies

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/4/(required-arrangement)

Searching Music

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/5/(required-arrangement)

Searching Pictures

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/6/(required-arrangement)

Searching Software

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/7/(required-arrangement)

Searching TV Shows

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/8/(required-arrangement)

Searching Featured

URL: http://www.mininova.org/search/%s/10/(required-arrangement)

How It Helps

Oh come on! Instead of visiting the site, selecting the categories, selecting the order, performing the search, you are doing all that at a single time. You Save Time!

Let me know if you like it or not, I await your comments.

Post from: Fabworker

Search Mininova Like A Power User

Search Mininova Like A Power User

Photo by Andres Rueda.

Watching foreign language films is a recent interest that I have developed. Though I understand the language, the problem arises with the accent. You probably miss out on some dailogs and lines…This problem can be solved by using subtitles. And today i will teach you how to use them.

Subtitles are available in some forms, one popular being the SRT. And a great website to search for subtitles is OpenSubtitles. Let’s see how we can use subtitles with our movies or video files.

You will need VLC Player for this to work. The methods for different players can be different, though in my opinion, VLC is the best of the lot.

1. Get your video file, let it be a movie.

2. Search for your movie on OpenSubtitles and select your language.

3. Download a subtitles from the given list.

You should probably download the subtitles which have been downloaded the most and uploaded by premium and authoritative members. The file you download will be a SRT file ( in a zip package)

4. Extract the zip package, and move the SRT file to the exact folder in which you have your video file.

5. Now you have to rename the SRT file same as your movie file, for example, if the name of the video file is movie.avi the name of the subtitle SRT file should be movie.srt Condition being that both the files are in the same folder.

Now when you play the video file, the subtitles can automatically be seen. Enjoy the world cinema!

Post from: Fabworker

How To Use Subtitles in VLC Player

How To Use Subtitles in VLC Player